Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Michigan Vacation (Part 1)

We are spending the week in Michigan for our family vacation. It. Is. Glorious.

Life for us had reached a new height of stress, and this vacation couldn't have come at a better time. But I suppose that's a blog post for a different day.

I sorted through some of the pictures I've taken so far, and I thought I'd go ahead and share a few now.

These are from the first couple days here. We are staying in a rental cottage on a lake. The first day we arrived, we mostly just played in the lake. The water is pretty clear for a lake, and there are paddle boats, kayaks, and a row boat. We used the boats to go out to explore the island in the middle of the lake. There's also a fire pit on our beach, and we've used it to make s'mores pretty much every night.

Our second day consisted of quick shopping for basic supplies, fishing, playing at a local park, and eating our weight in ice cream from a local shop. Plus playing on the lake.

We spent our third day at the theme park Michigan's Adventure. We went when they opened at 11:00am, and we stayed until they closed at 7:00pm! We spent an astronomical amount of money to eat lunch at the park, and we may have split a funnel cake before we went back to our cottage for dinner at the end of the evening. Michigan's Adventure has a bunch of roller coasters, and we rode every one that at least the boys were tall enough to ride. We managed to figure out how to ride everything even though there are 5 of us. After lunch we went to the waterpark side of Michigan's Adventure. We went down tons of tube slides, including the formidable Funnel of Fear (four times) and the Snake Pit (4+ times). After playing in all of the wave pools and water play areas, we changed back into our dry clothes, reapplied sunscreen, and went back to the roller coasters and games until closing time.

Here are pictures of just our first three days here!

We didn't take our camera to Michigan's Adventure, and we only took a few quick snapshots on our cell phones since we tried to keep them safe and dry most of the time.

While the boys were riding a big ride that Nora was too little for, we sat on a bench and decided to take some selfies. Keep in mind that this was after we had done all the water rides and I had been submerged in water repeatedly. Nora was getting tired of sitting out from the biggest rides, and I was just trying to entertain her.

Waiting in line for our very last ride on our favorite roller coaster, Zach's Zoomer (Nolan was wearing Jared's extra t-shirt because his was soaked):

Nora fell asleep on the drive back to our cottage. She didn't even wake up when Jared carried her inside.

We bought a bag of cotton candy on our way out of Michigan's Adventure. After dinner, we all dug into it. Jared made himself a cotton candy mustache: